Conducting an ongoing spend analysis is key to budgeting smarter

As with most business choices, time is of the essence when it comes to making decisions about spending money.

But how do you ensure that you have timely access to the data you need to create a budget that serves the company’s goals now and in the future? An ongoing spend analysis is a must.

Let’s start with the basics: what is a spend analysis? In short, it’s a close examination of an organization’s spending practices and a way to make sure the way your company spends money is as healthy as it should be. It's intended to provide visibility into an organization’s financial health by unearthing answers to questions like:

• Where's your money going?
• Who are you paying and how are they paid?
• When do your suppliers get paid?
• What does your money get you?
• Why are you paying this amount for a service or product?
• Does the budget need to be updated to be more cost-effective?

An “ongoing” spend analysis is, simply, the constant monitoring and examining of a company’s spending practices, or a way to answer all these questions continuously in real-time. An ongoing spend analysis that's systematic and accurate can help an organization develop wiser budgets and save money.

Rather than waiting until the end of the accounting cycle to reconcile expenditures, an ongoing spend analysis provides decision makers with constant visibility into the nuances of the budget. With this visibility into spending practices, decision makers have the flexibility to make adjustments in real time.

Using Teampay for an Ongoing Spend Analysis

Teampay simplifies the spend analysis process by providing instant visibility with intuitive, filterable dashboards. This means no extraction or formatting is necessary, and because you’re managing your spend in one place, no data consolidation is needed either. By cutting out these labor-intensive steps, Teampay makes it easy to conduct an ongoing spend analysis.

Teampay’s ability to help you achieve continuous accounting keeps you informed about spending practices—and helps you make in-the-moment decisions based on what you learn in real time.

Continuous Accounting in Action

For example, when Parsley Health realized it lacked full visibility into its spending practices, the healthcare company turned to Teampay to help alleviate uncertainty and reduce the workload on its growing team. As described in this recent case study, Parsley Health sought a way to revamp its expense reimbursement model while improving real-time visibility into monthly spending.

With Teampay’s patented distributed spend management platform, Parsley Health found the visibility they needed without waiting until the end of the accounting period to learn how money was being spent. It also synced transaction data automatically with QuickBooks, enabling the accounting department to respond quickly to irregular expenses.

Set Up Your Team for Growth

In addition to uncovering potential cost savings, enabling greater flexibility and providing more visibility into spending practices, an ongoing spend analysis can open a pathway for other benefits that might not otherwise have been possible.

Some of these benefits are laid out in a recent essay on continuous or “real-time” accounting published by the International Association of Independent Accounting Firms. With instantly updated profit, loss, and spend data at your fingertips throughout a given month, you can reduce inefficiencies, uncover potential tax benefits, experiment with creative tactics to maximize your budget, and discover pathways to faster growth.

Teampay’s platform gives you a central source of actionable spend data, accessible around the clock and throughout the accounting cycle. The time saved frees your team to focus on innovation and clear spending-related roadblocks.

Track Spending, Save Time

For example, fast-growing Silicon Valley startup Branch implemented Teampay to help streamline a heavy amount of purchases and save time on end-of-month reconciliations. Branch’s success story can be found in this recent case study.

Formlabs, a fast-growing 3D printer manufacturer, also needed to streamline how it managed and tracked spending to keep up with growth. The purchasing challenge was summarized in this recent case study:

“Finance and operations teams were left in the dark as they could not effectively assess the necessity or urgency of any given item [ordered for purchase], and engineers were frustrated by the repetitive work and lack of visibility.”

Teampay’s spend management platform enabled real-time visibility into purchasing and allowed Formlabs to integrate Slack and streamline communication among the finance team, engineers, and managers. The approval process became much smoother and faster because the finance team no longer had to manually approve, categorize, and track purchases.

Autonomous budgeting became possible, creating self-sufficient teams that were better able to handle the increased workload as the company grew.

Ready to see Teampay’s spend analysis features in action? Follow this link to request a demo!